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YOU know what the hardest part of writing a grab bag column is? Coming up with a clever introduction. So let's dispense with it and get right down to business:

There is something wonderfully ironic about Kinder Morgan's announcement, just four days after the Enron verdict, that it plans to take the company private in a $22 billion leveraged buyout. The co-founder of Kinder Morgan is Richard D. Kinder, the former president of Enron. He started his company in 1997, after being squeezed out of Enron by its chief executive, Kenneth L. Lay. On Mr. Kinder's way out the door, he shrewdly bought something called Enron Liquids Pipeline for $40 million, and that asset — precisely the sort of old-fashioned business Enron had increasingly little use for — became the foundation of Kinder Morgan. Last year it had $550 million in profit.

So why did Mr. Lay let so capable an operator slip away? The answer, quite simply, is that he never understood the importance of having a grown-up like Mr. Kinder running the show. Instead of appreciating Mr. Kinder for his business skills, Mr. Lay groused that the company president wasn't polished enough to be promoted to chief executive — a job Mr. Kinder believed had been promised him by Mr. Lay. And he was upset when he discovered that Mr. Kinder, who was recently divorced, had taken up with Mr. Lay's secretary, also recently divorced (they are now married). When the Enron board declined to give Mr. Kinder the top job in late 1996 — after Mr. Lay declined to endorse the move — Mr. Kinder walked.

To compound his error, Mr. Lay buckled under pressure from Jeffrey K. Skilling, then the head of Enron's trading operation, who told him that he would quit if anybody else got the job. Mr. Lay quickly acceded to Mr. Skilling's demand. I think you know the rest of the story.

In the wake of my Home Depot column last week, I got a few e-mail messages making a point the company's communications folks have been making in recent weeks: is it really fair to judge the performance of the chief executive, Robert L. Nardelli, solely on the basis of the company's stock price? After all, even though the stock has declined during Mr. Nardelli's tenure, Home Depot's sales have doubled, its earnings per share have increased to $2.72 from $1.10, and the company says it has created 100,000 jobs. Sales growth and earnings are "what the C.E.O. is responsible for," wrote one correspondent — not the stock price. If the chief executive is running the business properly, and the stock still won't budge, how can he be blamed for that?

Here's the problem with that argument. When executive pay started to ratchet up in the 1980's, it was mainly because boards were larding chief executives with stock options to "better align" their interests with shareholders. As the stock market went up — and compensation skyrocketed — executive pay defenders consistently said that it was deserved because investors did well, too. Indeed, Home Depot's own proxy statement puts it quite straightforwardly: "The company believes it is essential that a large portion of our executive officers' total compensation is tied to stock performance, which more closely aligns their interests with the long-term interest of shareholders."

And yet with the stock down during Mr. Nardelli's five-year tenure, the company now argues that we should focus on sales growth and earnings instead of the stock price to justify his enormous compensation. Sorry, fellas. You made the rules. You should play by them.

Speaking of Home Depot, it is nice to see the company acknowledge that its stonewall tactics at last week's annual meeting amounted to a major blunder, and that it's going to adopt the majority voting provision that the shareholders approved. It'll be interesting to see, though, whether the provision has any effect on the directors when they award Mr. Nardelli his compensation next year. Somehow, I have my doubts.

The sale of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News to a consortium of local businessmen has me wondering whether the newspaper industry has stumbled on a new business model — or at least a new ownership model. The leader of the consortium is Brian Tierney, a high-profile ad executive; the group also includes Bruce E. Toll, a founder of Toll Brothers, the home builder; and Michael J. Hagan, the NutriSystem chief executive. After the deal was announced, there was a flurry of worry that the new owners might try to influence the newsgathering process. And while Mr. Tierney has said all of his partners signed a pledge vowing not to interfere, undue influence is certainly a legitimate fear. Moguls don't much like reading tough articles about themselves any more than anybody else does.

But would the city of Philadelphia really have been better off if the two papers had been bought by a publicly traded newspaper chain? Not likely. The Inquirer's prior owner, Knight Ridder, had decimated the once-proud paper in its quest to serve up the numbers Wall Street was looking for, and any new chain would probably have continued the process.

The Joe Nocera column in Business Day last Saturday, ruminations on a number of topics, referred incorrectly to a $165 million donation to the Oklahoma State University athletic department by Boone Pickens, the hedge fund manager. The money will be used to build an athletic village near the university; it will not be spent to improve the university's golf team.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 3, 2006, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Column That Needs No Introduction.